So everyone from the weapons manufacturers to the Israeli government benefits from the status quo, while most people in Gaza are children and stuck in an open-air prison and can't do anything about the situation.

WHAT POLICIES AND PROPOSALS DO YOU SUPPORT AS A POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS IN THAT REGION? This is a tough one. It's not my place to tell the people here what they should do and how they should act. This is the problem with Americans: We think we have all the answers and everyone should fall in line under our empire, answer to our economic hit men, or suffer the consequences. So all of this talk about "what they should do" is nonsense. What I should do as an American is recognize that it is my government that is engaged in endless war. I mean Obama the Nobel Prize Winner is engaged in warfare in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Colombia, with over 800 military bases all over the world — and for what? Do you feel safer because of this? I don't.

Half of all our tax dollars go to military expenses that make our air and water toxic, while our roads crumble, our infrastructure rots, and we don't know how to resist because we suffer from a deep poverty of isolation and apathy in the US. So we need to focus our energies at home . . . We need to stop providing the entire world with weapons — over 90 percent of every bullet or bomb that flies through the air every day is made in the USA. We need to be pissed off enough to take real risks or nothing will change, at home or abroad.

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE | July 24, 2014 When three theater companies, all within a one-hour drive of Portland, choose to present the same Shakespeare play on overlapping dates, you have to wonder what about that particular show resonates with this particular moment.

CHECKING IN: THE NEW GUARD AND THE WRITER'S HOTEL | July 11, 2014 Former Mainer Shanna McNair started The New Guard, an independent, multi-genre literary review, in order to exalt the writer, no matter if that writer was well-established or just starting out.

NO TAR SANDS | July 10, 2014 “People’s feelings are clear...they don’t want to be known as the tar sands capitol of the United States."